RE5 exam venues: where you can write, province by province

You write the RE5 at a physical venue booked through Moonstone. The current schedule lists 34 venues across all nine provinces. Almost all of them are church halls, community halls, guesthouses or sports clubs hired for the day, not dedicated test centres.

Those numbers come from a capture of the faisexam.co.za schedule taken on 9 August 2026: 579 sittings over 74 exam days, from 25 August to 11 December 2026. The venue network is fairly stable month to month. Seat availability is not.

Where can you write the RE5 exam?

At one of the venues Moonstone books for the sitting you register for. The 9 August 2026 capture had 34 venues in use, with at least one in every province.

You do not choose a venue on its own. You choose a sitting, which is a venue plus a date plus a start time, and that is what you book and pay for. The filterable list of all 579 sittings, with a province filter and seats remaining, lives on the RE5 exam dates page.

What the RE5 exam venues actually are

Ordinary community buildings. The schedule is full of names like JHB Fontainebleau Community Church, Pretoria NG Kerk Queenswood, Durban Westville Methodist Church and Alberton Reading Country Club. Moonstone hires a hall, sets out tables and sends invigilators.

Plan for that rather than a corporate exam centre: trestle tables, stacking chairs, street or yard parking, no cafeteria.

The exam is paper based and invigilated: 50 multiple-choice questions, 2 hours, pass mark 65%, which on 50 questions means 33 correct, or 66%. Bring the ID or passport you registered with, and arrive early: these are suburban addresses where parking fills up. Format and rules are in the complete RE5 exam guide.

Province by province: where the sittings actually are

The network covers the country, but the sittings are concentrated. From the 9 August 2026 capture:

Gauteng 257 sittings, all at just 8 venues.

Western Cape 126 sittings across 4 venues.

KwaZulu-Natal 73 sittings.

Mpumalanga 28. Eastern Cape 26. Limpopo 23. Free State 23. North West 14. Northern Cape 9.

Two provinces hold roughly two thirds of every seat on the calendar. The busiest venues were JHB Fontainebleau Community Church (50 sittings), Pretoria NG Kerk Queenswood (49), Durban Westville Methodist Church (46), Roodepoort St Luke's Methodist Church Wilropark (46), JHB Gereformeerde Kerk Randburg (44), CPT St Stephens Anglican Church Pinelands (44), CPT Monte Vista NG Kerk (33) and CPT Pinelands Catholic Church (31).

In Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban or Cape Town you have a real choice of dates most weeks. Everywhere else the calendar is thinner than it looks.

What to do if you are outside a major metro

Treat the date as the scarce thing, not the venue. Northern Cape had 9 sittings and North West 14 across nearly four months, roughly one every two weeks.

Three consequences. Book early, because there is no next-week fallback if your date closes, and only book once you have honestly checked whether you are ready. Expect to travel, since for many towns the nearest venue is in the provincial capital or over a provincial border. And budget for it: the R1 300 fee, plus fuel, a possible night away and a day off work. A 4am drive before a 2 hour exam is a bad trade if you can go the afternoon before.

How to choose between two venues on the same day

Seats remaining. A sitting with 2 seats left can close while you fill in the form. Take the one with room.

Start time. Nearly all sittings are mornings: 09:30 on 305 of the 579 and 09:00 on 264. Only 10 had a 13:30 start, so do not plan around an afternoon option.

Travel on the morning itself. A 09:00 start across a metro means peak traffic. A slightly further venue at 09:30 can be the easier trip.

Parking. Halls and clubs usually have a yard. Suburban churches often do not.

Can you write the RE5 online or remotely?

The schedule Moonstone publishes is venue based. All 579 sittings in the 9 August 2026 capture had a physical venue and a physical start time, and the paper is written under invigilation. Nothing in that schedule looks like a remote or home-based option.

If you cannot reach a venue for a medical or accessibility reason, ask Moonstone directly rather than inferring from the schedule. Your preparation can be entirely online. The writing of the exam, on the published schedule, is not.

Booking a seat before it goes

Registration closes 11 working days before each exam. That is more than two calendar weeks, so the soonest date you can book today is usually about three weeks out, not next Monday.

Of the 579 sittings, 144 had fewer than 5 seats left, and 135 of those had zero. The median sitting still had 25 seats remaining. So about a quarter of the calendar was shut or nearly shut, worst at the busy Gauteng and Cape Town venues.

Pick your date first, book it, then study to that date. Registration, payment and the 24 hour payment window are covered step by step in how to book the RE5 exam, and every open sitting is listed on the RE5 exam dates schedule.

RE1 venues for key individuals

Almost identical geography. The RE1 was offered at 569 of the 579 sittings in the same capture, so a venue and date that suits the RE5 almost certainly suits the RE1.

The difference is the paper, not the place: the RE1 has 80 questions and needs 52 correct for 65%. The RE1 exam dates schedule lists the 569 sittings, and how to become a key individual covers where the RE1 sits in the approval process.

Before you book the trip, check where you stand

A hall three hours from home is a bad place to discover you were 4 marks short. PassPath's free readiness check takes about 15 minutes, needs no card, scores you against every FSCA qualifying criterion the exam tests, and returns a readiness score plus a red-to-green topic heat map. Run the free readiness check before you commit the R1 300 and the fuel.

PassPath is an independent study platform. The RE1 and RE5 are written through Moonstone; PassPath is not affiliated with Moonstone or the FSCA.